Almost every business that gets in touch with us has tried Instagram ads at some point. And it nearly always went the same way: a photo people liked, the blue “Boost” button, twenty euros and, a week later, lots of likes, a couple of new followers and not a single call. The usual conclusion is that “Instagram doesn't work for my kind of business”. Sometimes that's true. More often, what didn't work was the way it was done.
How Instagram and Facebook ads work
Running Instagram and Facebook ads means paying Meta, the company that owns both, to show your ads among the posts people are already looking at. It's all managed from the same place, which is why the industry calls it Meta ads: a single campaign can appear in the Instagram feed and Stories, on Facebook, in Messenger or in WhatsApp Status. You set the budget and Meta auctions each ad slot among the advertisers who want to reach that same person.
The real difference from Google is something else, and it matters more. On Google people search: they type “hairdresser in Girona” and you show up when they already want something. On Instagram nobody is looking for anything. They're scrolling through their friends' photos and dog videos, and your ad slips in between. Instagram ads don't pick up a need that's already there: they create it. That's why they're planned differently.
The audience is there. According to IAB Spain's 2026 social media study (in Spanish), 86% of internet users in Spain aged 12 to 75 use social media; Instagram has a monthly penetration of 77%, Facebook 56% and WhatsApp 94%, and 44% of users say social media influences what they buy. Your customers are there. The hard part is getting them to stop at your ad.
When Instagram ads pay off for a local business
They work when what you sell catches the eye, or when you have a concrete reason for someone to come this week rather than “some day”. These are cases where they tend to deliver:
- Restaurants, bars and cafés: a dish, the seasonal menu, the terrace that's just opened.
- Hairdressers, beauty and wellbeing: a before and after, a free slot on Thursday afternoon.
- Shops with their own products: what's just come in, shown in someone's hand rather than in a catalogue.
- Academies, gyms and schools: places on a course that starts on a set date.
- Openings, events and time-limited offers: anything with an “until Saturday”.
They work less well when the need is urgent or very specific. Someone whose pipe has burst at ten at night isn't won over by a reel: they search on Google and call the first business they find. For that kind of business, money goes further in a well-built Google Ads campaign. In short: if your customers search for you, go to Google; if they need to discover you, Instagram makes a lot of sense.
The “Boost” button isn't how you advertise
“Boost” is the quick route. You take a post you've already published, choose a simple goal (more messages, more visits, more engagement), an amount and a few days, and Meta shows it to more people. It's useful for giving a push to something people already liked on its own. For anything else it falls short: Meta itself explains in its guide to boosted posts and ads that a boosted post doesn't have as many customisation and detailed targeting options as an ad created in Ads Manager, which is where you find objectives such as leads or sales, the different formats and control over where each ad appears.
That same page carries a warning almost nobody reads: if you add funds to advertise from the Instagram app on an iPhone, in most regions Apple may take a 30% service fee on that payment. Boosting from your phone gives you less control and can also cost you more.
The practical rule fits in two lines. Has a post done well on its own and you want more people in your area to see it? Boost it. Do you want people to book or ask for a quote, and to know what each customer has cost you? That's set up in Ads Manager.
How to build a campaign that brings customers, not likes
The objective of your Instagram ads: enquiries, not applause
The first thing Meta asks is what you want to achieve, and that answer decides who sees the ad. There are six objectives: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion and sales. The system is very obedient: ask for reach and you get reach; ask for clicks and it brings you people who tap on everything and buy nothing. For a local business that wants customers, the usual choice is leads or messages. Each result costs more than a click, but behind every one there's a person who has told you something.
The audience: your area and not much else
This is where the opposite mistake usually happens: narrowing things down until nobody's left. Women aged 35 to 42, within two kilometres, interested in yoga and vegan cooking. With such a narrow audience the campaign gets more expensive and learns slowly. It works better to set the area properly, a radius around your premises or the towns where you really work, and let the system search within it. What really filters is the ad itself: if it opens with “Live in Palamós and haven't had a haircut in months?”, it makes sure the right people stop.
The ad: made on your phone, with your face in it
On Instagram you're not competing with other ads, you're competing with your customers' friends' photos. A stock image is spotted straight away and scrolled past. For small businesses what tends to work best is the real thing: you, your premises, your product in your hand, filmed vertically and in good light. The first few seconds decide whether someone stays, and the text has to make three things clear: what you offer, where you are and how to get in touch. If people appear in the ad, get their written permission first; we explain how in photos with people: the permissions you need.
Instagram ads that open a WhatsApp conversation
Of everything Meta offers, for a local business in Spain this is one of the most profitable: an ad whose button opens a WhatsApp chat with you directly. No forms, no detour through your website. The person taps the button, a pre-written message appears and they send it. With WhatsApp on almost everyone's phone, it's the shortest path between seeing an ad and starting a conversation.
There are two conditions. The first is having WhatsApp Business properly set up: a complete profile, opening hours, quick replies and a welcome message that doesn't sound like an answering machine. The second is replying quickly. An ad that brings in messages at eight in the evening and a business that answers at midday the next day is money down the drain, as we explain in detail in how fast you reply to leads. If you won't be able to handle the messages, choose another format.
The alternative is forms that people fill in without leaving the app. They're convenient because they fill themselves in with the details Meta already has for that person, and that's exactly why they're sometimes sent without much thought. A trick that works: add a short question that makes people type something, such as “what would you like done?” or “for how many people?”. You get fewer leads, but better ones.
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How much to spend on Instagram and Facebook ads
There's no fixed price: you set the budget and Meta charges according to the auction. What there is, though, is a useful minimum, and the system itself sets it. Meta explains in its help page on the learning phase that a campaign usually stabilises after about 50 results in the week following the last significant edit. Until it gets there, results come in fits and starts and each one costs more.
Run the numbers with your own figures. Say each WhatsApp conversation costs you €6. To reach 50 in a week you'd need around €300 a week, over €1,200 a month. If your budget is €300 a month, that campaign will never finish learning. So what do you do? What Meta itself recommends: aim for a result that's easier to get (a message rather than a purchase), put the money into a single campaign instead of spreading it across five, and don't touch it every other day, because each significant edit restarts the learning.
To decide how much, start from the end: how much does a new customer leave you? If you close two out of every ten conversations and each customer leaves you €150 of margin, you can pay up to €30 per conversation and still make money. That's your ceiling. Below it, the campaign pays off; above it, it doesn't, however good the dashboard numbers look.
How to tell whether it's paying off
Likes, reach and new followers don't pay the bills. What you need to check every week is the same as in any campaign: how many enquiries it has brought in and what each one has cost. And then, how many of those enquiries ended up buying.
If you send people to your website, you need the Meta pixel properly installed, with a compliant cookie notice, to know who arrives and what they do. If everything goes through WhatsApp or the phone, keep a note by hand: asking “how did you find us?” or running an offer with a code that only appears in the ad already gives you a pretty good idea. There are more ways to do it in how to know where your customers come from.
Mistakes we see almost every week
- Boosting from your phone with no objective, “just to see what happens”. What happens is likes.
- Choosing traffic or awareness when you want customers. The system does what you ask, not what you meant.
- An audience so narrow there's nobody left to show the ad to.
- The same ad for three months. Your area is small: in the end everyone has seen it four times and it stops working. It needs refreshing every few weeks.
- Touching the budget or the ad every other day, which is the surest way never to leave the learning phase.
- Sending people to your Instagram profile when they wanted to book, instead of to WhatsApp, a form or a landing page that talks only about what's being advertised.
A free tip before you spend anything: open the Meta Ad Library, which is public, look up your competitors and see which ads they're running right now. In ten minutes you'll know what they offer, how they put it and how long each ad has been running. If one has been going for months, there's a reason.
What it costs for us to run it
Managing Google Ads and Meta ads campaigns is included in the plans Mid Presence, €750 a month, and Advanced Presence, €1,500 a month, plus VAT and with no lock-in. It covers setting up the campaigns, writing and refreshing the ads, reviewing results and cutting what doesn't perform. The €1,500 plan adds two posts a month on your social media, which is the organic side we cover in social media for local businesses.
Ad spend is separate: it's paid directly to Meta, with your card and in your name, and you decide the amount. We don't touch it or add a margin. And if you need a page to send the ad to, the one-page landing costs €100 a month with hosting included. All of this is part of our digital marketing service, where ads are one piece and not the only one.
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Where to start this week
There are three things you can do without spending a cent. Look up your three nearest competitors in the Ad Library. Check that your WhatsApp Business has opening hours, an address and a decent welcome message. And work out how much you could pay for a new customer without losing money: with that number you already know whether Instagram and Facebook ads make sense for you, and with what budget.
If you'd rather we looked at it with you, message us on WhatsApp or use the contact form. We'll tell you frankly whether you should advertise on Instagram, on Google or, for now, on neither.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.